


You Can't Switch the Bomb Off and You Did(n't) Call the Police?

by pennypaperbrain



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, Fix-It, Gen, Stream of Consciousness, reaction fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2014-01-02
Packaged: 2018-01-07 04:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/pseuds/pennypaperbrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I worked out what it was about the bomb carriage scene that made me think it isn’t actually a travesty. YVMMmassivelyV. But the best way of explaining seemed to be this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Can't Switch the Bomb Off and You Did(n't) Call the Police?

**Author's Note:**

> I seriously mean about the 'unedited' warning - I haven't even read this back properly. The style is well rough. But it's more part of the current fandom discussion than a fic, so I wanted to put it up right away.

‘YOU CAN’T SWITCH THE BOMB OFF AND YOU DIDN’T CALL THE POLICE?’ 

Of course he called the police. That just means the police are about to die, with them, if Sherlock doesn’t solve this. He’s overreached himself. Wanted to impress John by solving everything and waltzing away just as the police turned up to attend to the minor practical issues. Impressing John, moment by moment, keeps John needing him.

Yet he’s never really impressed John. _You can’t switch the bomb off and you didn’t call the police_. That’s what John thinks of him. And half-true is enough true, because Sherlock is supposed to be perfect.

 _The timer has started._ He wasn’t good enough. He gropes through mortification and fear, and _You can’t switch the bomb off and you didn’t call the police..._ and he grabs the forms of morality. ‘Go John.’ That’s what a hero would say. John wants a hero, not a genius. And if John goes, if the buzzing rushing sweet anguish of John’s presence goes, maybe he can be the genius, which is what they need. Possible outcomes: die what John wants him to be, or live on with John. Yes, good. Enough. Best available. ‘Go now.’

John won’t go. ‘If we don’t do this, other people will die!’ The moral whip. The worthlessness of intellect except as a service. His worthlessness. He has wasted more seconds trying to be what John wants. He lowers his eyes. Wheels move in his mind.

 _‘Mind palace!’_ demands John, as if it was a revelation.

What? His fact-retrieval system? When the only thing that will save them is evidence-based deduction, mentally and then dismantling this machine like Mycroft, the clever one, learning Serbian in hours – he has only seconds – distractions – no no ‘How will that help?’ And he loses it, he’s staring incredulous at John, throwing up his hands, calling John on this shit, this idea of emotions structure resources, anything except pure lone intellect racing the dark.

...And John calls his bluff. John _does believe this_ , believe in him, the heroic last moment salvation by genius, and Sherlock is at his limit; he can’t break faith with John’s idea of him, not in their last seconds. He plays Mind Palace, acting the gestures. It becomes real.

And there he finds the fact. The tiny, silly fact. He stares at John.

John wheels away from him. ‘Oh my god.’ John does not understand. John thinks they will die. They will not die but Sherlock doesn’t have the voice for saying it, for kindling John’s faith when he is so utterly undeserving of it, because it’s John who sent him to the answer. John, John. Sherlock is trembling, his vision blurring, and he _must find the switch_. It could be anywhere, it could be concealed as anything. He lurches to his knees, gropes frantically. John is silent. John is silent, facing death. John may have saved them and Sherlock is the blundering fool on the floor and nothing matters, he lets his body shake and gibber off emotion as he searches.

He finds the switch. He stops the timer. He looks up and sees John.

‘I’m sorry.’

You can’t stop time. Yet Sherlock has. When you stop time, emotion crashes in. Self crashes in.

‘I can’t. I can’t do it, John. I don’t know how.’

He can’t do it; be John’s hero. Dead, he was the man John thought him. Live, he is... this. There is a nauseous shaking surge, contained in him now, so he can speak quietly, but he is not John’s hero, John’s man, and the proof is what he’s doing right now. Yet if he does this he’ll know what John thinks of him, truly, of all he’s done, because in John’s mind they are about to die, and John will be honest, in a way so far beyond Sherlock, but he likes to watch it, reinscribing at the same time his own nature, the lone bastard mind.

‘Forgive me,’ he says. _What?_ ‘Please, John, forgive me,’ he tries again, with a praying gesture, too much? Yes, too much; he is trying so hard for what John would want, because John can’t read him as he is. ‘For all the hurt that I caused you.’ Is that right? Is that what you do with the pain?

‘No, no no no no, this is a trick.’

‘No,’ says Sherlock, almost to himself. This is the part he truly means. He is trying. He is trying. What he is doing is wrong. He needs it. He needs it. He is being a person, a goldfish.

‘Another one of your bloody tricks. You’re just trying to make me say something nice.’

Oh God. Sherlock feels the corner of his mouth quirk up, bitter at himself because it’s true. It is true because when he loses John after this, that ‘something nice’ will be all that’s left for his life and no he’s not strong enough to renounce it, not to prove himself the shit he is by grabbing it.

‘No. Not this time.’ Fuck, this is real. He observes from outside a moment; curious.

John is relentless. John is oddly soft-voiced. ‘This is to make you look good, even though you behaved...’ Yes, that is who Sherlock is. In the open it hurts oddly less than when he smothers it in pride.

He clambers up awkwardly, adrenaline- and relief-stunned. John is far away.

_‘I wanted you not to be dead.’_

Sherlock’s weary. He wants done with this now. ‘Yeah well, be careful what you wish for. If I hadn’t come back, you wouldn’t be standing there, you’d still have a future, with Mary...’ John still does, John still does. _And you’d still love me, ideal and dead._

‘Yeah I know.’ John overlaps with the word ‘Mary’. What does John know? What does Sherlock understand of it? John knows his future was, is with Mary.

Sherlock weeps. It’s odd when he weeps. At the same time he is detaching a little, beginning to watch himself as he should. Pulling himself together.

‘I find it difficult, this sort of stuff,’ says John.

‘I know,’ says Sherlock. He doesn’t. He knows almost nothing at this point, but he wants to hear John’s voice.

‘You were the best and the wisest man that I have ever known.’

Sherlock freezes, staring.

‘And yes of course I forgive you.’

Pause.

Sherlock only asked forgiveness for his return. Instead he’s being offered forgiveness even for what he’s doing now. What John thinks is their death, though it’s only a new wound, a new trick.

John will always forgive him. He’ll never deserve it. Their expectations will never match. Terrifying grace. John looks at him with a tolerant love, ordinary, then closes his eyes for death.

Sherlock begins to laugh. There’s no way out of this but laughter. If he had a gun, he’d scratch his head with it. If he had a soul, he’d leave John for real this time. Instead he just has John. He’s keeping him, any way he can.

**Author's Note:**

> Right, I did warn you about the underedited overwriting, but I think as a potential interpretation there’s some value in it. I reserve the right to disown this completely on Sunday 5 Jan or at any other point!


End file.
